Amazon celebrated their 20th anniversary last year with the first annual Amazon Prime day. With an Amazon Prime membership in hand, customers were invited to partake in thousands of special deals on July 15th. Amazon, being one of the world’s largest online marketplaces, gathered a record-breaking 86 million visits from mobile and desktop browsers on Prime Day. In terms of sheer visits, Prime Day was a runaway success, beating Cyber Monday’s traffic by 51.5 percent and Black Friday’s traffic by 77.2 percent. In terms of sales, Prime Day was also no slouch, leaving Black Friday’s record at the time in the dust with 398 orders per second.

Amazon previously had no plans to make Prime Day an annual event, but its immense success landed the online giant another money-making holiday. Last year, Prime Day was on July 15th; this year, Amazon has announced that Prime Day will occur on July 12th.

Although not all products will be discounted on Prime Day, you should still expect significantly higher traffic. To prepare, make sure your inventory for all featured or popular items is as healthy as can be.

As you may remember, Amazon’s first attempt at Prime Day was met with a significant amount of negative feedback, mostly concerning the quality of the discounted products. As a result, for their second attempt, Amazon has focused more on finding better products to feature on Prime Day.

Earlier this year, Amazon sent out a letter to their merchants that use FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) in hopes of finding products suitable for lightning deals on Prime Day. However, if your product didn’t make the cut for lightning deals, don’t worry. It’s a major event, and you can still expect a up to a tenfold increase in traffic. Don’t take this huge exposure boost lightly. You'll have tons of opportunities to attract new customers once lightning deal items are out of stock and users continue to look for similar deals.

To help make the most out of the Amazon Prime Day festivities, we’ve put together a couple of tips. Follow these, and you’ll be on your way to being a prime time seller on Amazon Prime Day.

Stay Competitive

Keep your prices up to date. Prime Day may bring along huge boosts in traffic, but with great traffic comes great competition. Every seller on Amazon will be gunning for a slice of the pie, so make sure you keep pace with all of them.

Even if your product won’t be part of the lightning deals sponsored by Amazon, deal hunters, latecomers, and everyone in between will still find their way to your products. Make sure they choose you over your competitors by doing market research and adjusting (read: probably lowering) your prices accordingly.

Offer A Little Extra

In addition to a competitive price, you can always offer something more to bring customers over the fence to your products. It is Prime Day, after all. Consider rewarding early buyers with extra deals like free or reduced shipping and/or discounts on your products.

To really spread awareness for these deals, take full advantage of social media. Let your followers know that you’ll have deals available during Prime Day with a few social media giveaways. Hopefully, you’re gaining followers—ideally, you’re gaining customers.

Conclusion

Amazon Prime Day is set to yet again be one of the largest spending holidays in history, so make sure that you’re completely prepared and that your business is more visible than it’s ever been. Deal hunters and serial shoppers will be swarming over the products that Amazon has highlighted. In order to have a successful Prime Day, you need to grab the bull by the horns and fully leverage the free promotion and increased traffic Amazon is providing.

If Prime Day ends up being another huge success and the issues from last year are resolved, we could see a tradition of annual Amazon-sponsored Prime Days in the years to come. One step a time though - first, make sure you’re prepared for this year's extravaganza so that you can reap the benefits.